The software is designed to combine the WAN automation and management for multi-vendor physical network resources that's in Cyan Inc. 's Blue Planet software with virtual resources such as cloud services and virtual network functions.

Planet Orchestrate is designed to cut opex costs and complexity. But it does more than that, Cyan CMO Joe Cumello says. "We're creating an environment for services providers to break out of the commoditization cycle they're in." Services such as Ethernet, optical, and IP are highly commoditized.

"The pricing of the services keep going down," says Cumello. "We're providing operators with the ability to not just manage those Ethernet circuits or optical circuits in a multi-vendor situation, but to add virtual services on top of that to create new revenue streams. We're allowing them to change the network service to something greater than it was before so they can charge more for it."

The orchestration technology can help service providers allow enterprise customers to provision network resources on the fly, for example, spinning up and down virtual machines or temporarily increasing bandwidth. "This moves service providers up the value chain from being dumb pipes to being able to sell value added services," says Recep Ozdag, Cyan's director of solutions marketing for SDN and NFV. "As service providers are converting points of presence and service offices to data centers, they can manage and orchestrate those data centers from a single pane of glass."

Using Planet Orchestrate, carriers can deploy services either in centralized data centers for ease of management, or at or near the customer premises for performance, Cyan says.

Planet Orchestrate is available now for proofs-of-concept and trial deployment. Commercial availability for NFV orchestration and multi-domain will be in August, and cloud service orchestration will be commercially available in the fourth quarter. Pricing will be based on the number of nodes and virtual functions being orchestrated.

Cyan's message of increasing service provider agility is similar to that of other vendors touting network virtualization.

Cyan touts multi-vendor support as its differentiator, which positioning makes it similar to -- and possibly in competition with -- Brocade. (See Brocade Unveils Open Carrier Platform for SDN, NFV -- and we've got an article on Brocade's virtualization strategy in the pipeline.)

Whether Cyan succeeds against the competition will depend on execution.

Cyan also says it's adding two new partners to its Blue Orbit ecosystem. Fortinet Inc. and Certes technology can now be managed by Blue Planet.

The 'gleaming city on a hill,' Steve Saunders calls it. But who is going to take us from today's NFV componentry to the grand future of a self-driving network? Here's a look at the vendors hoping to make it happen.

Understanding the full experience of women in technology requires starting at the collegiate level (or sooner) and studying the technologies women are involved with, company cultures they're part of and personal experiences of individuals.

During this WiC radio show, we will talk with Nicole Engelbert, the director of Research & Analysis for Ovum Technology and a 23-year telecom industry veteran, about her experiences and perspectives on women in tech. Engelbert covers infrastructure, applications and industries for Ovum, but she is also involved in the research firm's higher education team and has helped colleges and universities globally leverage technology as a strategy for improving recruitment, retention and graduation performance.

She will share her unique insight into the collegiate level, where women pursuing engineering and STEM-related degrees is dwindling. Engelbert will also reveal new, original Ovum research on the topics of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, security and augmented reality, as well as discuss what each of those technologies might mean for women in our field. As always, we'll also leave plenty of time to answer all your questions live on the air and chat board.